


A Venue Towards a Fond Grotesquerie

by Senri



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-31
Updated: 2009-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-05 13:03:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/42018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senri/pseuds/Senri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Kakuzu and Hidan intimidate a man, and Hidan propagates unnecessary cruelty towards animals.  With apologies to Harlan Ellison.  Written for 31_days, "the many colors of a bruise".</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Venue Towards a Fond Grotesquerie

The dog, first, Hidan picks up and holds against the house's front wall. The sober Akita alights with hostility in his hands, swimming giant forepaws at his partner's bare chest, choking out muffled growls and barks. Cut off as Kakuzu comes forward with a kunai and drives it through the bearish dog's throat. Blood rolls hotly through the thick coarse fur on it's neck and chest, and almost right away the little front walkway stinks of it. Kakuzu drives his weight against the blade, forcing it through gristle, tendon and flesh, breaking bones as he forces the kunai through the flesh and into the wall. He's strong. It's messy, but not too difficult.

"Fucking mutt," Hidan says, releasing the dog. Its corpse jerks against the wall. "Look what it did to me."

Occupied with wrestling the Akita's forelegs down so he can push kunai through the wrist joints and pin them to the wall in turn, Kakuzu barely glances at the livid red scratches now marring his partner's skin. The legs dealt with, he revisits the kunai in the throat, making sure it's pushed in far enough and will hold the body up against wall. By then the dog is still, dead with its eyes open. Kakuzu wipes his bloody hand off on the brindle fur.

"Are you listening, rag doll?"

Hidan surely knows he isn't - or, well, that he's heard and doesn't care. Feeling suddenly weary Kakuzu rubs at his forehead, smearing the skin below his forehead protector with a crusty swipe of blood. "You have the robes?"

"Yeah." Hidan hands the first to him. An un-slight woman's faded kimono, patterned with ears of wheat. Kakuzu pins it up next to the dog - a kunai through the soft blue collar, through each of the cuffs. Beside him Hidan does the same with a robe that had once belonged to the eldest daughter. Their target has quite the brood - four more robes to pin up after that, two boys and two girls, all decreasing in size.

Kakuzu pins up the last robe, a young boy's so small it could only belong to a child barely out of toddlerhood, if that. Hidan slaps his hands together, glaring at their handiwork. "Fucking waste of time."

Kakuzu sighs and says nothing, because he agrees. He has always found threats pointless, action more effective. If the father had held his family's safety in esteem he wouldn't have made overtures to Akatsuki in the first place, much less taken small steps towards betraying them.

The display of force might balk him temporarily. But the problem will only be solved with his - painful - death. If Pein wasn't actually an incorrigible optimist underneath it all he might accept that, but Kakuzu personally doubts the day will ever come.

"Not like a fucking dog means anything." Hidan picks up his scythe from where it leans against the wall, and then slammed the haft against the wood in a burst of ill temper. "We should just fucking kill the asshole."

"Come on," Kakuzu says. "Find the papers and we can leave."

Midday, all the family is out, father lunching with his partners, drinking too much sake and getting tipsy, mother working hard at the lab, children at daycare or school. The curtains to the master bedroom are pulled, the room dim. Sunlight glimmers warm and gold through the slats in the blinds. Kakuzu turns the desk lamp on and riffles through stacks of paper, the various drawers. Feels for hidden panels. Finds nothing, as expected. Hidan emerges from the closet with one of the wife's good kimonos held to his front. "I'm tho pwetty," he lisps. "Thwow me down the thtairs and fuck me rough, baby."

At Kakuzu's bored stare he roars with laughter and throws the delicate silk in a pile on the ground. Picks it up again and puts it away, unbidden.

Kakuzu leaves the desk and goes to the hall. He'll search the children's rooms, next.

Hidan doesn't follow him to the oldest daughter's room, or the second-born's. Good. The man is just a distraction; Kakuzu works faster without him. He finds the papers in the baby's room, tucked into a storybook and jammed in the corner on the highest shelf. Poorly hidden, but their client couldn't be called imaginative. The whole thing takes him maybe half an hour. That's no concern. He's confident they have time.

Flipping through the packet, everything seems to be in place. He sticks the papers into his briefcase and puts the book back. All that remains is collecting his partner. Hopefully the man hasn't gotten into too much trouble.

Hidan is out in back of the house, in no trouble at all. Just sitting cross-legged at the edge of a small man-made pool, scythe lying on the grass, chin propped in his hands. Almost dreamily, he stares into the quivering waters, but Kakuzu sees his eyes flicker and knows that below the lily pads and frondy plants something moves.

Hidan says nothing nor does he glance up as Kakuzu approaches him. Following his partner's gaze, the Falls-nin catches the rapid slip of piebald scales just below the surface as a koi rolls to eye him.

"Check it out," Hidan says, reaching down and trailing his fingers in the water, once Kakuzu stands across the pool from him.

For a moment nothing happens, as ripples spread from his pale fingers. And then languidly the koi moves from the shadowed waters, rolling again so a spiky fin comes particles away from breaching the water's surface. The round mouth gapes, the round eye stares up. Hidan moves his fingers down the slimy side as the carp slips away from his grasp into the shadows.

"Does it every fucking time." He stares after the fish, gaze piercing whatever reedy den it had retired to. "One of the little snots must have really fucking babied it, seriously."

The children, of course. Kakuzu supposes it was them; he has trouble imagining the besieged wife or the busy oldest daughter coming out day after day to sit on the sunned poolside and tame the koi. Perhaps more than one of the brood had contributed to the training, since the fish came so readily to a stranger's hand; or perhaps it was just hungry. Either way it is a well-loved fish. As much a pet as the dog.

His partner appears so innocent, lounging next to the quiet water. A young, pure icon. So painfully young sometimes. Kakuzu wonders how he can keep it up. Or perhaps it does come naturally. For all his age, Hidan sometimes seems like a very young soul, especially compared to Kakuzu, who every now and again acutely feels the weight of his years pushing down on him. Silent, the pressure as strong as lying on the ocean's bottom.

And then now and again Hidan seems shockingly old, endowed with a leprous, scabrous old soul. Like a sore, weeping, crusted black and red. A mark on the world, refusing to heal.

They are similar, in a way, Kakuzu and his partner. But their differences repel them more than their sameness unites them. They leave different marks on the world, Hidan with his exultation in orgiastic cruelty, random as raindrops. Kakuzu doesn't care enough to work at cruelty, although he has no problem in indulging if the job requires it. It takes more energy than he can be bothered to waste. Hidan is old, but Kakuzu's been alive longer, and he started out in the ocean, where everything was cruel just to live. The sea destroys, too, when its rage bursts free, like his. Which is why Kakuzu recognizes what he sometimes does as cruelty, but prefers a different word: pragmatism. A shark, a sea eagle, the ocean. They are pragmatic. As is he. They do what they must. Hidan is obliged to go the extra mile.

Hidan is smooth like a thing often touched. A white river stone shaped by eons of water and air.

Kakuzu's smoothness - where he is smooth - is like something never touched. Not once.

"Come on," he says.

"Wait." Hidan climbs to his feet, lifting a forefinger and smiling oddly at his partner's irritable gesture. "Just one fucking second. Just one. Seriously."

He reaches down, dabbles his fingertips in the water again and watching him Kakuzu knows what comes. Hidan is avid now, teeth showing through his grin, as out the koi slides. It moves with ponderous grace, as though it carries far more size than it does, and slowly it quests towards the priest's tempting motions.

The water churns and crashes when Hidan plunges his hands down fast. Sharp reflexes, the priest has not; but sharp enough to catch a tame and foolish fish he is. Slime be damned.

His fingers slide under the thick gill-plates. Hidan lifts the fish from the water, unconcerned by its tortured thrashing, the body curving back and forth in perfect arcs. Underneath the protective scales Kakuzu sees the gills, red with blood and spiky like combs. Fins flitter. The round mouth gapes, shuts.

"Fucking catch of the day," Hidan boasts, alight with dangerous excitement. "Pretty, right? Check it out."

Kakuzu has killed many fish in his life. Spurred by hunger, while traversing the ocean he'd sometimes even attack dolphins and small sharks, and as he grew had infrequent run-ins with a few transient orcas. But fish were his staple. Thundering onto them out of the dark, breaking up their tightly packed schools, shredding their tender flesh. They could feel, too, when he wasn't hungry, and moved fearlessly around him then.

Hidan stands with the carp. Water runs from the gill slits, tainted red. His picks up his scythe with his free hand. "Okay," he says, holding the fish out in front of him and grinning with fond malevolence. "Let's blow this fucking Popsicle stand. Let's go."

They walk around the house, this time. In the path between the house's wall and the low wall corralling the estate. Kakuzu doesn't want a trace of their passage left in those walls; it will be far more terrifying for the man to realize how gently they can move, drifting like leaves through his most private spaces, as insubstantial as sunbeams, intruders he'd never know were there but for their consideration in notifying him. The dead dog, the pinned-up robes; they are the signs he wants to leave behind.

He pauses and waits when they get around the house and Hidan looks over their handiwork again. Flies have found the Akita by now. They cluster thickly, fat, shining green and blue, buried in the fur to sip blood and lay their eggs. An ignoble death inflicted upon a noble animal. He'd have preferred to kill the man and leave the dog, born of stock clearly better than it's master.

"Got a kunai?"

Kakuzu stills for a moment. Then he reaches in his pouch and finds a blade, silently holds it up for his partner. They'll have to restock soon, he notes. Especially after this.

Hidan takes it from him, walks past the dog, the line of robes. A few flies lift off as he passes and settle again almost immediately.

Next to the youngest child's robe Hidan turns and holds the koi up like he's deciding where to hang a painting. A moment, and he drives the kunai through the fish, just below the tail, so the carp hangs head-down and the robes are thus bookended between two dead animals.

The fish's mouth still works. The fins still riffle like fans. Muscle surging, goaded by impulses shot from a dead brain. The blood is thick, clotted, very dark.

"Che. Slimy as fuck." Hidan loses interest, turns around and maunders back to his partner. The scythe leaves scuff marks on the honey-colored wood. "We leaving or what?"

They go out the way they came in, hurtling as anonymous shadows over the rough wall, leaving their sign behind. It may be a long time yet before any of the family comes home to see it; under the sloping roof of the home, on the low deck beside the front door, it will shortly smell of the charnel-house and certainly never will be unstained again.

Kakuzu doubts that the father, if he arrives first, will be able to hide any of what occurred from his family. The oldest daughter will probably collect her siblings and herd them home hours before either parent is released from their office. Either way, he feels very little for them. If a dead, beloved dog and a dead, beloved fish are the most horrible things they ever meet in their lives, well - they're lucky.


End file.
